VP of Engineering

Wooster Games is the studio behind Animal Company, a free-to-play VR co-op adventure game. Within a year of launch, Animal Company became the top-selling game of 2025 on Meta’s platform, reaching 1M+ monthly active users, a 400K+ Discord community, and a global fanbase that has generated 1.5B+ organic views across social media. At Wooster Games, we believe digital entertainment should be more social, more physical, and creatively empowering. As we scale our experiences to new platforms, we’re partnering with leading tech and entertainment companies to shape the future of interactive play.

Role

Wooster Games is looking for a VP of Engineering who thrives in fast-moving environments and loves building systems and teams that scale effortlessly. You’ll own the technical vision behind our next-generation platform and experiences—architecting the backbone that powers our social, high‑energy, drop‑in multiplayer gameplay. This role blends deep technical architecture, hands‑on game/platform engineering, and a strong product mindset, all while reporting directly to the CEO. If you enjoy bouncing between high‑level system design and rolling up your sleeves to debug a tough issue in the same afternoon, you’ll feel right at home here.

More than anything, this is an AI‑maximizing leadership role. You’ll lead Wooster into an AI‑first era of game and platform development—championing tools, workflows, and processes that make our engineering org faster, smarter, lighter, and more creative. You’ll mentor and empower a high‑velocity team that iterates constantly, ships boldly, and has fun doing it. If you want to shape the future of how games are built while helping small teams punch far above their weight, this is the opportunity.

What You’ll Do

Technical Strategy & Architecture

• Own end-to-end architecture of our next-generation platform—game backend, services, data flows, multiplayer pipelines, tooling, deployment, and reliability.

• Build for scale, security, speed, and high availability across globally distributed systems.

• Drive clarity around build-versus-buy decisions, vendor evaluation, and long-term technical investments.

• Establish technical standards that prioritize performance, simplicity, and developer happiness.

• Partner closely with creative, design, and production leads to make sure engineering decisions unlock creative freedom—not limit it.

AI Leadership & Integration

• Establish Wooseter as an AI-native engineering org, where AI tooling is integrated throughout development, deployment, and operations

• Pioneer AI-assisted IP development workflows: rapid concepting, market signal analysis, narrative generation, and prototype spin-up so the studio can explore new game ideas at a pace traditional studios can't match.

• Champion AI usage and drive adoption across:

• code generation & refactoring

• automated testing & QA

• infrastructure management & monitoring

• data analysis, anomaly detection, & modeling

• build pipelines & release automation

• documentation, planning, & technical design

• content workflows and asset pipelines

• Continuously push the team toward using AI to do more, faster, with higher quality.

Engineering Excellence and Velocity

• Champion workflows that prioritize speed, iteration, and ease of use—short cycles, rapid prototyping, minimal friction.

• Level up release processes, build pipelines, shared tools, and our QA practice to support fast and safe deployment.

• Lead the studio in maximizing AI tooling for development, testing, asset handling, automation, and workflow acceleration.

• Push for pragmatic, maintainable solutions over over-engineered ones—champion the mantra ship, test, learn, improve.

• Create an environment where engineers feel supported, trusted, and excited to experiment—especially with AI.

Organization Leadership

• Build, mentor, and scale a high‑performing engineering team where people feel supported, trusted, and excited about what they’re building.

• Partner with the CEO and studio leadership on resourcing, project planning, and long-term platform strategy.

• Partner with creative, design, and production leads across multiple projects to make sure technical and AI systems unlock creative freedom rather than constrain it.

• Help keep what makes Wooster special: a fast, ambitious, collaborative environment where people genuinely enjoy the work and the people around them.

• Stay abreast of industry trends and how competitor games evolve their mechanics, aesthetics and business models to drive acquisition, fandom, and engagement

What You Bring

• Senior engineering leadership experience in games, real-time systems, online platforms, or similar distributed environments.

• Demonstrated experience integrating AI across development, deployment, and operations.

• Strong grasp of modern ML/AI tooling—LLMs, generative systems, inference pipelines, and how they integrate into game production workflows.

• Strong hands-on technical background—comfortable reviewing architecture, prototyping solutions, and diving into code when needed.

• Proven ability to design and scale secure, resilient, high-availability distributed systems.

• Experience guiding teams through rapid iteration cycles, feature experimentation, and live‑ops evolution.

• Deep familiarity with modern DevOps, CI/CD, testing automation, observability, and cloud-native infrastructure.

• A track record of building high‑velocity engineering teams that ship confidently and often.

• Excellent communication skills—able to simplify complexity, build alignment, and inspire teams.

• Passion for gaming, social experiences, and creating the technical foundation for unforgettable player moments.

Why Join Us

• Direct access to CEO + ability to shape the entire technical future of the studio.

• Massive creative and technical ownership—build the platform and team from the ground up.

• A small, ambitious, talented group that moves fast and has fun doing it.

• Remote-first culture with flexibility and trust.

• The opportunity to define how social, multiplayer experiences scale across new platforms.

Compensation & Benefits

• Fully remote position; open to applicants from North America and Europe

• Competitive base salary based on geography

• Comprehensive benefits package

• Monthly stipend for AI tooling, learning & development expenditures